How to find Leads and Prospects on Twitter

This article was published in 2015, we recently updated it with more relevant content in 2019 

As far as it goes for Facebook, business is getting less and fewer opportunities there. Which is, of course, welcomed even more by the other big social networks – Twitter and Linkedin.

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but Twitter is extremely useful when it comes to finding leads and prospects. 

But honestly, I don’t think why it should supervise people anymore. 

According to a report by Statista, Twitter has roughly 328 million users across the globe.

Come to think of it – that’s a whole lot of potential under one virtual roof. 

But are all those people relevant to you and your business? Absolutely not. 

However, you only need some right strategies to figure out your leads and prospects from this vast pool of potential. 

1. Twitter sales process

It’s not hard to come across people who treat Twitter sales process in the manner as they would probably treat email marketing. 

What I really mean is that people are absolutely clueless about the Twitter sales process. So much so that they start their prospecting process by sending out their pitch via DMs. 

Trust me, if someone unknown sends me their pitch via DM, I would either ignore it or wouldn’t even open it in the first place. Because it might work on emails sometimes (even that is doubtful) but this is unlikely to work on Twitter. 

If you are taking this route, then you are probably coming off looking like a spammer. 

For example, I received this on my Twitter DM. I have no clue about what the person is pitching for.

Now, this is another Twitter DM interaction. Please note that I used the word “interaction” rather than “sales pitch”.

What makes this one a better option is the fact that here the professional is not directly asking me to click on their page or trying to sell something. Instead, they are asking my opinion on something that I may relate to.

If you want to leverage Twitter you have to be a little bit creative and authentic. Moreover, the shortcuts won’t work here. 

First and foremost, you have to build your audience on Twitter by tweeting useful and relevant stuff regularly. For example, if you are a marketing professional, post links to your blog posts or videos, along with some useful tidbits. 

2. Redirect people from Twitter to your own page or website 

As a marketer or a sales professional using Twitter, primarily your goal is to move off the people from your Twitter timeline into your sales funnel or your blog page. 

In the above point, we have already mentioned how you should regularly post informative videos, blogs and tidbits on Twitter. So why not post your own content and then redirect your audience from there to read your full blog? 

Here is an example of some tweets that we regularly send on our Twitter timeline that leads our audience to one of our landing pages.

Here are some of the must do things that you should know in order to create an effective twitter timeline: 

• Your tweets should directly link to your landing page so that your audience wouldn’t have to go through additional trouble. 
• Keep it brief and concise. 
• Don’t use multiple call-to-action. In fact, only use ONE call-to-action.
• Keep track of your audience on Twitter along with the twitter conversion rate. 

3. Follow companies in the same vertical as yours

In order to sell your product, you should pitch it to the right niche and people.

Therefore, before anything, you should look for such companies on Twitter that are vertically integrated into your business and offer what you have along the chain.

Say, for example, if you are positioned in the industry of selling blue widgets, follow others who are selling blue widgets.

You might also want to follow the prospects and companies that are followed by your competitors.

For example, our official twitter handle follows various marketing people and lead generation companies, many of them we found from the following list of companies who are in our niche of prospect generation.

4. Use Twitter advanced search query 

So in the very beginning, we mentioned that Twitter is roughly used by around 328 million users. 

You might also like to know that every year, about 200 billion tweets are sent out.

But not all these people and tweets are relevant to you or your business. What you need to do is to extract the ones that are useful to your business. 

And this is where Twitter’s advanced search queries come into play. 

Follow this step-by-step process to learn how to use the Twitter advanced search query:

Step#1 “Advanced search” menu

Every Twitter user knows how to do your regular Twitter search, right? 

Now from the search menu, you will see the option “search filters” on the left side. 

From here, click on the “Advanced Search” option to proceed further. 

Step #2 Add relevant keywords 

Now you will be redirected to this “form-like” page. This field will help you get an advanced search result as compared to the generic Twitter search. 

You can fill the following fields to get better-curated search results: 

• Relevant keywords 
• Exact phrase you want results for 
• Related hashtags 
• Location search 
• Date of the tweets and more.

Make sure that you don’t go overboard with the keywords and only ever use the keywords and phrase most relevant to your search. 

You need to form a cloud of the best words and phrases to research, based on the product or service you are selling. Include some synonyms too. This would give you results from potential prospects, which though, you should definitely have to research before engaging.

5. Use Twitter Software & Tools

The Internet is flooded with Twitter management tools which do more than just managing followers and scheduling tweets.

HootSuite is the most popular among this type of software tools. Basically, it is all-in-one. Helps you manage your presence on Twitter, connects you with the right people and companies, that have the potential to be your prospects and last but not least – has the feature of analyzing everything, related to your activity on the site.

Another very useful software, that aligns with your work with the Advanced Search of Twitter is SocialOomph. What is so great about it, is that allows you to follow specific hashtags and keywords. So after you defined the important phrases, related to your prospects, you can receive live feed on every single one.

Although this well cannot go dry, we can include and the Chrome plugin of Buffer, that we talked to you about a few days ago. It is a schedule and analyzes tool, which definitely deserves a mention, hen we talk about social media.

7. Use Twitter as a customer service tool 

I am sure you are indulging your customers with a stellar customer service — and it’s extremely good for your business. 

But you know what will be even better? Using Twitter as a customer service tool! 

Hear me out – if you encourage your customers to seek your help or solutions on Twitter, other people will immediately get to see how wonderfully you treat your customers and how responsive you are. 

And it is actually a very proven tactic, so much so that Customer service interactions are exponentially increasing on Twitter. 

Your leads are automatically going to assume (and rightly so) that if you are so quick in responding, then you are likely to be a brand they should definitely do business with. 

That said, if you encourage queries and questions on your timeline but fail to resolve them or respond to them, then it might end up giving you a bad reputation. 

Plus, Twitter is easy and people don’t have to go to the hassle of placing a call or writing an email to reach you. 

Supporting this claim, one study suggests that Twitter is the least frustrating customer service channel. On the other hand, the phone call is the most frustrating customer service channel. 

So don’t wait another day before leveraging Twitter as a customer service platform — you already have an edge here.

7. Make Twitter lists

This would give you the comfort of other people finding you, instead of you doing all the hard work. Mentioning certain people (that you have definitely researched beforehand) and companies, would make them interested and willing to make the first step.

If someone has included your company in a list with the best ones out there to rely on in the insurance business, you could easily be drawn to them, see how they found you and so on. Once the first step is made, everything along the line will happen naturally.

Conclusion 

In this post, we primarily focused on finding leads and prospects on Twitter, but it doesn’t end here. 

After you are done with the prospecting part, you will have to engage your prospects and leads to turn them into permanent customers. 

Keep track of the people tweeting about you, your product or brand. Reach out to such people and engage them directly. 

Use all the mentioned strategies from Twitter advanced search to creative hashtags. This will help you find relevant and productive leads and prospects. 

How do you use Twitter in order to boost your business? How has Twitter advanced search option benefited you?